Over the love of you
by i love alex
Summary: He finds himself washing her clothes at 3 in the morning when he can't sleep.


A/N: This little thing has been sitting in my drafts folder for awhile now, waiting patiently to be uploaded which for some reason, I continuously put off until now. It's short, it's not enough but it's something to put out there until I can get my shit together when it comes to writing these two again.

Starting right after episode 4x15.

Enjoy:

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He finds himself washing her clothes at 3 in the morning when he can't sleep.

There's a slowness in his step, in the way he unfolds her jeans and rubs stain remover over the marks of dried blood. There's a slowness to the way he moves and handles the bundles, separating them into piles, to the way he thinks and ebbs and flows, never allowing himself to rest too heavily in any one motion. In any one place. In any one thought.

She's breathing through her mouth and has curled inwardly against the bed she was lying in, slabs of thick brick and concrete separating the two of them.

He washes her clothes because he can't keep counting the inward gulps she takes as if he were counting down and not up.

Damon had supplied her with his entire stash of alcohol, handing it over to her like it were candy to a small child and she tossed shot after shot back until she was tiptoeing her way across the second floor banister. Stefan sat on the couch, carefully watching her while Damon stood, silent by the fireplace, switching his gaze between her play and the dying flames of a fire that had only been half heartedly lit.

When she slips, barely catching herself on the railing and preventing a fall that would've, if she were still human, snapped her spine, they've all had enough.

Damon, without saying a word, leads her in the direction of a guest bedroom

Stefan listens to the way his brother, in an uncharacteristic move, walks away from her. Not lingering after she's closed the bedroom door, uneven and heavy in his footsteps as though his feet were moving though his brain had no idea where to tell them to go. There was a disconcertion here now, a confusion of how to behave and what to do. Stefan could feel it from his brother like heat, so strong it was, knowing that losing Elena in this way, as much as it was his decision, was also a great defeat.

Damon, finally managing to find the safety of his own room, whispers a goodnight to his brother, and Stefan catches it in both ears, lets it linger and resonate before he whispers it back, wondering how, as the light from the fire grew weak, he was ever going to get off this couch.

For hours, he doesn't.

He thinks, of her, of Damon. Endless ends and endless meets though the two never collide. He thinks of Jeremy and feels an anguish that has steadily been pressing against him for what has been almost 24 hours now, licking at his sides, begging to be released.

Though knowing if it were to be, would mean his own incarnation, he ignores it. He ignores it and instead, he plans. For the next day, for the next week. Plans of defence, for offense. For how she should be treated, for how this thing should be fought.

Humanity, he thinks. How should her humanity be fought. He snorts to himself and brings his own glass of straight rum to his lips. It burns like a torched river and he only makes it down by clenching his eyes shut and counting to 5.

It would come to them fighting her, perhaps. With acidic works and actions because she had nothing in her but a numbness he had to disassociate himself from, like she had to disassociate herself from him.

He remembers the way she had looked at him. How she had fought. How stubborn she had been, refusing to believe his act. His façade. Refusing to believe any of it because for every reason he understands now when back then he didn't, she still loved him.

He still loves her, weighted and burdened by hurt. By history. By actions, he still loved her so.

With the strength of a small animal, he gets off the couch, leaving his half full glass on the table and follows the shadowed footsteps leftover by his brother to the room Elena would now occupy as her own.

Her clothes, like she had no further use for them, are flung and spread out around the room and he collects them as if they were snapped and torn petals she had plunked mindlessly from a flower.

Thinking, knowing that to plan was fruitless, knowing that to plan for her behaviour, to action it, to prevent it was pointless, no easier than his own had been, that if she forgot how to associate care as something that used to be seamed against her, he would act and be, and remember for her.

When he's finished, he gathers together what courage he has and looks at her, tucked away beneath a sea of sheet. He doesn't know why he needs so much of it, courage but the longer he stares, the weaker he feels and he understands that courage these days could no longer be pulled from her.

She was his courage, she was, so often, what he would wrap around himself as armour; she was thick against his skin.

She's wearing a shirt that is too big for her body and he's glad that even with his eyes, the dark made it impossible to tell whether it belonged to him or to Damon.

A current carries him through the motions of separating her underwear from her jeans. Her sweater from her white camisole. She probably had clothes somewhere stashed in Damon's room and even probably still had clothes in the bottom drawer of his own dresser, but these were to be preciously washed and folded.

These clothes she would never wear again and yet he washes them and iron them and folds them immaculately. Not thinking of her face as she cried on the floor, not thinking of a fear that had been so paramount within him, he couldn't do anything but stand there and let his brother strip her of something so embedded in who she was it seemed impossible to imagine her without.

She's still fast asleep, should be for at least a couple more hours and he puts the pile at the foot of the bed and walks out of the room, unwilling to linger in the air of her any longer.

His room is a sanctuary, his bed a lighthouse he feels he must kept watch from with ears that never sleep. He's listening for her, he's listening to Damon. He's listening and not thinking and not remembering Lexi. Zach. Her brother.

But somewhere between dawn breaking and the moon disappearing, his door opens.

He watches as she sneaks in, illuminated only by the moon through the panes of his balcony window, and finds his bed. She's half dreaming, he can tell, her face a wash of calm features and so stunned he is, he finds himself pulling his body over to make room for her like this were so normal.

He wonders, if he himself were half dreaming.

Her body lands, her eyes closed and he watches, prying his limbs free to turn over and give her room, as she curls her body in his direction coming to a stop, extending out her hand like it were an offering.

He holds it. He enfolds her thumb and her fingers, her palm and her knuckles does he hold.

His life house, a beacon she must have found in the night. With a slowness of a drugged man, he lays back down. She is his drug, has been for always and he watches her until his eyes close, thinking that he would wash her clothes every day for the rest of her life if it meant she would still be living.


End file.
